Last week, a number of news headlines suggested that the German state of Bavaria was trying to "ban" Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
In fact, no such thing had happened. What had taken place was that
Bavaria's minister president, the Christian Social Union (CSU)
politician Horst Seehofer,
had gone back on a commitment to fund a critical, academic edition of
the book, set to be published just before copyright runs out on 1
January 2016.

The finance ministry of Bavaria, where the
publishing house behind Mein Kampf was officially registered when it was
liquidated in 1945, has owned the copyright to the work since the end
of the war, and has in the past denied any requests for publication.

In 2012, however, the Bavarian parliament had announced that it would help fund a critically annotated academic publication of the book produced by the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte,
which has been worked on since 2009. A year ago, finance minister
Markus Söder told the political magazine Cicero that "we want to make
clear what rubbish is written in this book, and what fatal consequences
it had", adding that "we have to demystify this book".

Now,
after investing €500,000 in the project, the CSU seems to have had
second thoughts about the Bavarian crest appearing in the academic
edition, reportedly after complaints from Holocaust survivors....